If that had been scheduled for Monday night, then I think Kim and I might have actually been worried... For a couple of kids from South Louisiana, even with some hurricane and tropical storm experience, the wind and rain we felt on Murter on Monday was something!
Each of the windows and doors on Ante's house have storm shutters. They lock, but the seal isn't exactly tight, so with each blast of strong winds, there was plenty of creaking and cracking and eerie noises from the old house :-)
We came to learn later that this was a pretty typical storm, formed by the Bura winds, originating from the mountains inland within the continent, and blowing hard out toward the sea.
And with the rain came many freshly bloomed poppies in the morning.
We spent all of Monday exploring the adorable little island of Murter, which has over 2000 years of recorded history. You can read about it from this picture, yourself. The origin of the name is a bit of a mystery. The word is quite similar to the Latin word for "death", but also similar to another Latin word for an wine press. "Island of Death" sounds pretty ominous, perhaps named by pirates, or sailors, having marooned someone here? There are some interesting ancient burial mounds on a remote tip of the island, so perhaps another possible origin. Who knows :-)
We drove most of the perimeter of the coastline of the island, stopping at a number of labeled historical and archaeological sites.
One of the oldest is this ancient Roman cistern, dating from before 100 A.D. Even to present day, there are no freshwater wells on the island, so the ancient settlers survived entirely on collected rainwater. The freshwater system from the mainland was only introduced in the 1990s. Our host, Ante, recalls as a kid walking to the Hotel Colentum and carrying water jugs back to the house!
The arch, stone, and mortar here are all in exceptionally good shape, for being almost 2,000 years old.
We didn't experience much along the lines of wildlife on this trip, but these giant snails were very beautiful.
A couple of kilometers from the Roman cistern are the ruins of the ancient palace and settlement of Colentum, founded about the same time as the cistern.
Several rooms, or apartments, and numerous doorways are clearly visible within the ruin. The sea itself laps right up into the structure, today.
There's quite a bit more of the ruin below sea level now, which I had hoped to explore with a SCUBA excursion that unfortunately did not come together this time around.
We drove the length of the coastline, from town to town, covering Murter, Betina, Tisno, and Jezera. All of the towns are very similar, with their orange tile roofs, quiet harbors, and deteriorating old vessels.
Compared to the rest of Croatia, there was precious little English to be found in many of this small towns. We had the basics in Croatian, though -- Dobro dan is "hello", hvala is "thank you", pivo is "beer", čaj is "tea", and of course cappuccino is "cappuccino". So yeah, with that vocabulary we survived.
Kim sampled dozens of different fruit teas, from apricot to pomegranate.
The city streets are absolutely tiny, and many of them are two way, but can barely fit one car across. I was quite thankful we were in such a tiny car :-)
And we did manage to find ourself on a couple of roads that just "ended", like this one. I think they might have been closed for the season, or perhaps under construction. I drove over 2 kilometers in reverse, up and down a hill, to get out of this pickle :-)
We had lunch by the sea in Tisno, right next to the drawbridge that connects Murter to the mainland.
Another couple of glasses of their house red and white local wines, I had more cevapcici, and Kim had a pizza.
After lunch, we drove to the far end of the island, toward the town of Jezera. We parked and hiked up to a couple of remote churches, again. Most of them were built in the 16th and 17th centuries, as I recall.
All of the limestone masonry was beautiful. Several of the churches looked like something out of a Dan Brown novel. We were on the lookout for shadowy the Knights Templar.
Having driven quite a few rental cars around several countries now, we have wizened up a bit, and now travel with a wireless FM transmitter that hooks up to our stereo out on our cell phones.
Oh, and Ante hooked us up with Sigic, a GPS navigation system that ran on my Android phone. You can download all of the map data over WiFi, and then use it entirely offline, which was far more convenient than paying $Ridiculous_Amount per MB to use Google Maps.
We definitely took the hard way up the hill to this remote church. Do you see the big fat foot path?
Yeah, well, we missed it somehow, and blazed our own trail up :-) I called it an adventure. Kim might have complained, a little ;-)
I think we ran into this couple almost everywhere we went on the island of Murter :-) It was off season, but I think we were about 30 years younger than the median age on the island.
So that particular church, for instance, was built in 1780, merely 4 years after the United States Declaration of Independence. This was one of the new churches, by the way.
It was phenomenally
As you can see in this picture, each of these churches have fairly thorough lightning rod systems. It does give you a little concern when you hear thunder overhead, and realize that.
To finish our day, we drove quite a ways down a dirt and rock road to the most remote end of the island. Along the way, we noticed what appeared to be a couple of burial mounds. Cross-referencing the map, there was a marked "archaeological site" right about here (without any detailed information), so we just made up our own stories about the place :-)
And that was pretty much our Monday. We felt like we captured the spirit of Murter, Dalmatia, and certainly this part of Croatia. The slow moving, sleepy lifestyle on the island, with its rich history and ancient artifacts struck a chord with us, and fed our appetite for relaxation while on vacation.
In the morning, we would head toward Split and Dubrovnik for a bit more hustle and bustle...
:-Dustin
Woah! 2 km in reverse uphill doesn't sound like fun :)
ReplyDelete